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Date:      	Sat, 4 Mar 1995 10:00:04 -0800
From:      "Mike O'Brien" <obrien@antares.aero.org>
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: backspace now broken 
Message-ID:  <95Mar4.100021pst.111161-2@aero.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 04 Mar 1995 04:35:58 PST." <199503041235.HAA07031@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu> 

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Gene Stark says:

> The PC keyboard has two keys: "<-" and "Delete".  When I walk up to such
> a keyboard, I expect "<-" to generate 0x8 and "Delete" to generate 0x3f.

I'm in agreement on this one, as I've said.  Thinking it over
last night, I realized that others feel equally passionately
the other way - their keyboards seem saner to them after this
change.

Using kernel calls to change single key mappings smacks to me
of special pleading and bad design.  I would suggest that it
might make sense to be able to switch between entire well-
publicized key mapping tables, something like the Microsoft
"code pages".  Plan Nine, out of Bell Labs, which could
logically be regarded as the successor to UNIX, is now a
Unicode system, with 16-bit characters.  I certainly don't
suggest we go that far, but a selection of well-chosen
key mapping tables would go far to satisfy the needs of
the international community, which in the absence of
ISO character set capability has gone over to remapping the
ASCII character set to a variety of national character
sets.

Just a suggestion.  I do know that on my system, the
Backspace key is going to generate ASCII 0x08.  I'd
prefer to do this via a judicious call in /etc/rc.boot
rather than by changing the kernel source with every
release.

Mike O'Brien



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